Contemporary Moroccan Immigration and Its Ghosts

Abstract

Hayden White, among others, has written extensively about how historical facts are not “given” and “found,” have not simply happened to be then compiled by historians, but they are “constructed by the kinds of questions which the investigator asks,” in a dialogue with the present .² Linda Hutcheon also explains that both history and fiction are narrative discourses by which we assign meaning to the past, a meaning that is not to be found in the events themselves, but in the narratives that make those past events historical “facts” with relevance for the present.³ How we interpret the past is thus directly related to the types of narratives we choose to explain it. At the same time, the kind of past that is constructed by these narratives determines the ways we imagine and see our present and future. In Spain, today, we find a variety of narratives that attempt to come to terms with the profound social and psychological implications of having been transformed from an underdeveloped country that exported economic migrants to Northern Europe in the 1950s and 1960s into a modernized, economically advanced country that is fully integrated with Europe and that is itself the “Promised Land” for hundreds of thousands of migrants.

“In a state of nostalgia, the heart goes back to the past, but the past might be the future, sometimes when it is too late”

Miloudi Chaghmoum, “Shadow and Darkness.”¹